‘Westworld’ Season 3, Episode 3 Recap: Predators and Prey

March 30, 2020, 2:00 am1k Views

Season 3, Episode 3: ‘The Absence of Field’

Much of the first two seasons of “Westworld” was about the hosts wresting control of their destinies and exercising the same freedoms enjoyed by their human tormentors, who had cast them as attractions in a sadistic Disneyland for the global elite. But now that the action has shifted to the human world, the premise has been turned on its head: How much control do humans have over their destinies? It turns out to be far less than they might imagine.

The theme has been a long time coming, planted most prominently in the revelation that Delos was most interested in Westworld as an opportunity to harvest data from its guests, which was then kept in a massive server called the Forge. And it manifested last week, too, in Maeve’s peculiar adventures in Warworld and beyond, which she eventually discovered was a large-scale simulation devised by Engerraund Serac to gain intel on the robot uprising. When Maeve demonstrated flaws in the program by freezing a moment of action, it recalled the “bullet-time” effects of “The Matrix,” a film about a future where humans experience their lives as a simulation while machines tap them as an energy source.